Saturday, January 30, 2010

Friday Peeves #3

I don't feel like writing a real Friday Peeves today, so I'm adapting a positive thing into a peevish thing. I've been meaning to write this post for a while, anyway.

Wasting Money on Inferior Products That Can Be Made at Home with Superior Results(brought to you by Taco Night)

I found hard taco shells at Trader Joe's recently. Years have passed since I've had a hard taco. Most national brands use gross ingredients I don't eat, and we're obviously not patrons of Taco Bell, so we tend to be soft taco eaters around here.

The ingredients in most taco seasonings tend to be pretty gross, too, and it's really hard to get that genuine American taco taste without taco seasoning. I did find a pretty decent taco seasoning by Lawry's, but that was $1.39 for a packet I was going to use up all at once on my one pound of tofu. (Oh, by the way, freeze and thaw your tofu before you use it as a meat substitute; this changes the texture significantly.) The ingredients also included cocoa powder, the strangeness of which made me think someone must have created a knock-off recipe.

And indeed someone did! But they forgot the cocoa powder, and I didn't have any "minced onion" in my spice cabinet, so I took some advice from the comments and switched up a few things. Here's my delicious adaptation:

Mix all ingredients together. For one pound of crumbled and browned tofu (that you froze and thawed before cooking for maximum awesomeness), add about 3 tbsp seasoning (I added a little extra for more flavor) and 1 cup water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and serve.

And save the rest of the seasoning for next time. I'm going to make up a lot of this so I don't have to do so much measuring every other time I make tacos (which isn't often, but who says you can only use this on tacos, anyway?).